This is not a new conversation.
In 2016, the PhotoVogue Festival explored The Female Gaze, featuring artists such as Cindy Sherman, Petra Collins, Aida Muluneh, Nan Goldin, and Zanele Muholi. At the time, it felt urgent and revolutionary—a necessary counterpoint to the Male Gaze theorized by Laura Mulvey. A new generation of female photographers and filmmakers was reclaiming their right to look and be looked at on their own terms.
Nearly a decade later, we ask: Does The Female Gaze still capture the evolving complexity of how women see today?
While female-led perspectives in photography, film, and video have expanded, systemic barriers persist. Women continue to face disparities in visibility, opportunity, and financial stability. Meanwhile, digital platforms, while offering new avenues for representation, have also intensified scrutiny, commodified feminist narratives, and constrained women’s freedom of expression.
Perhaps The Female Gaze, as a direct response to The Male Gaze, is no longer sufficient—it remains tied to a binary opposition. Instead, contemporary feminist and critical theories have expanded our understanding of vision and representation, moving beyond rigid categories to embrace fluidity, intersectionality, and self-definition.
Sophia Wilson
Thinkers shaping this evolution include:
- bell hooks – Explores how race, class, and resistance shape women’s ways of seeing.
- Judith Butler – Argues that gender is fluid, performed, and constantly evolving.
- Rosi Braidotti – Links identity to technology, environment, and shifting social structures.
- Audre Lorde – Reframes difference as a source of power rather than division.
- Sylvia Wynter – Questions colonial and racial hierarchies that shape dominant visual paradigms.
- Donna Haraway – Challenges essentialism, advocating for hybridity and interconnectedness.
